page_title: Ocado
section_title: Technology
hierarchical_section_title: Ocado / Technology
caption_attribution_description: English: Bots moving inside an Ocado warehouse
context_page_description: Ocado is a British online supermarket that describes itself as 'the world's largest dedicated online grocery retailer'. In contrast to its main competitors, the company has no chain of stores and does all home deliveries from its warehouses. The company was floated on the London Stock Exchange on 21 July 2010, and is a member of the FTSE 100 Index.
context_section_description: Ocado Technology, a division of Ocado Group, designs most of Ocado's technology in-house, including but not limited to: website and apps; automated warehouses and robots; Machine Learning-based fraud detection and customer service systems; forecasting and routing systems. They describe themselves as specialists in: automation and robotics; big data and the cloud; web and app development; algorithms and smart optimisation; and discrete event-simulation.
  Ocado's warehouses are built with a giant 3D grid structure inside, within which groceries are stored in crates. On top, robots (over 1,000 per warehouse) coordinate in swarm-like behaviour to collect and move the crates. The robots bring the crates up from the grid into their interior and take them to pickers so the groceries inside the crate can be packed into orders. They then move the crate back into the grid. The robots can work together to 'dig' for the crates, moving crates out of the way to collect one buried lower in a stack. The movement of the robots and the storage location of the crates is managed and optimised by a central 'control system' using Artificial Intelligence. In this way, Ocado can pick a 50 item order in minutes.
  These 'hive' style warehouses are located in Andover and Erith. The Erith site is 36 acres, capable of processing 220,000 orders a week, with up to 3,500 robots running on its grid. Ocado's older warehouses, located in Hatfield and Dordon, are based on a complex conveyor system and use Artificial Intelligence to plan and optimise picking sequence, product location, and crate routing.
  Ocado Technology was involved in two EU-funded Horizon 2020 robotics research projects: SecondHands and SOMA and continues to experiment with robotics for automating picking and packing of grocery orders.
  Ocado has six technology development centres in Europe: Hatfield and London in the UK; Kraków and Wroclaw in Poland; Sofia in Bulgaria; Barcelona in Spain.
  In 2014, volunteers from Ocado Technology founded Code for Life, an initiative to provide schools with free resources for teaching coding.
caption: Robots inside an Ocado warehouse
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